Review: Motorola CLIQ

This was a difficult phone to review. Motorola has obviously spent a lot of time developing BLUR, which is the most important aspect of this device. As excited as I was going into the review, I found daily use of BLUR (at east with respect to social networking) to be quite overwhelming. You may not.

"Social networking" is a powerful buzz phrase that is being applied to all sorts of different devices and services. The CLIQ lives up to this terminology better than any other device to-date. For me, it helped prove that I actually do have a limit to how much I can be bothered by other people's Twitter and Facebook updates. Silence may be golden, but with the CLIQ, there is no silence, and no gold.

One thing to consider, this is MOTOBLUR 1.0. I fully expect Motorola to continue to develop and refine it, hopefully in ways that make it more useful to the end user.

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The sideways slider form factor is certainly appealing to many, especially those who prefer a real QWERTY keyboard for messaging. I am fine typing on glass, and wouldn't mind at all if Motorola halved the size of this phone and ditched the slider form factor completely. Less bulk would make me happy. But for those of you who need a keyboard, this is a notch in the CLIQ's favor.

If most CLIQs behave as poorly as my review unit did, then I'd caution users to stay away based on battery and signal performance alone. Any phone that can't make it through 12 hours is just no good. Neither is a phone that can barely connect to the cellular network. Hopefully, though, these faults are restricted to my unit and not all the production units.

In the end, I'd say you need to think about this phone a lot. Do you follow more than a few hundred people on Twitter? Have more than a couple hundred Facebook friends? Have hundreds or more people filling your Gmail contacts database? If you do, and can handle a non-stop stream of information pouring into your phone from all those people, then perhaps the CLIQ is for you.